Artemis Art 11002 and Art 4021

The large format cameras are designed to offer big Kodak CCDs a a breakthrough price.  They provide a step up from the Sony ICX285 cameras such as the Art285 to true multi mega pixel deep sky imaging. 

The Kodak sensors were chosen for the new cameras.  Kodak has a great reputation for providing CCDs for high end astronomy applications.  The KAI11002 is an 11 million pixel device with an active area slightly greater than traditional 35mm film.   The pixel size is 9um square; which is relatively large and makes a good match for a broad range of telescopes.  The KAI4021 is a 4 million pixel device 16mm square with 7um pixels.   This camera can make full use of 1.25 inch filters and does not need a telescope capable of filling the larger 35mm chip.   Both have an electronic shutter which, like the Sony ICX285, makes it very easy to use both for imaging faint deep sky objects or large scale images of a bright moon.   

Moving up from an ICX285 camera to one with a large format Kodak is the kind of quantum leap we were looking for.  Pictures from these cameras can look great regardless if they are viewed on a computer screen, printed out, or featured in a magazine.  On computer it’s possible to zoom into regions and keep seeing more and more detail.  The new Artemis is designed to be simple to use.   Jon Groves excellent Capture program is included as are plug-ins for Astro Art 2 and Maxim DL.  The camera only has two sockets, one for power (12V) and the other a USB2 connection.

To make a camera appear simple it needs to have brains!  The camera uses a standard Artemis operating system on a PIC microcontroller running at 32Mhz.  This looks after most of the house keeping functions of the camera including temperature control of the sensor.  The analogue to digital converter is made by Texas Instruments and can convert 2 million samples per second at 16 bit resolution.  A reprogrammable Xlinix logic device handles the high speed signal generation as well as data processing.  Both the Xilinx chip and the PIC are firmware updateable over the USB link so any firmware upgrades can be installed without requiring the camera to be returned.  Finally a Cypress  USB 2 controller is used to interface the camera with a computer.

While the cameras are designed to be a step up from the Sony ICX285 cameras they are very much still an Artemis.  As with the original Artemis it has been designed by astronomers.  Artemis has established itself making high quality, no frills, affordable cameras.  The Art11002 and Art4021 offer amazing value for money.